ABSTRACT
In Ecce Homo Friedrich Nietzsche refers to the Buddha as ‘that profound physiologist’. Buddhism, Nietzsche says, is one hundred times colder, more truthful, more realistic and more objective than Christianity. Nietzsche’s list of hygienic measures prescribed by the Buddha is rather extensive. In his classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann rejects what he refers to as Nietzsche’s late ‘physiologism’. Claudia Crawford’s paper entitled ‘Nietzsche’s Physiology of Ideological Criticism’ is designed to demonstrate, in her words, that ‘Ideology is physiology translated through forgetfulness by the seduction of language’. Babette Babich characterizes Nietzsche’s philosophy as a ‘hyperrealism’ because she wants to emphasize the scrupulous attention which Nietzsche paid in his observations and descriptions to acute differences and fine details. In the 1875 notebooks Nietzsche was already describing morality as starting from ‘mistaken physiological assumptions’. Nietzsche claims that belief in subject—attribute and cause—effect is to be found in every judgement.
